Luck would have it that TinkerTry passed several milestones, all in the past week! I've always been rather transparent at TinkerTry, and figured I'd share some private stats that aren't really easy to determine from public sources.

Sorry humanity, for 12.2M minutes of time spent watching this, I sure wish I had found a more elegant way around DNS when installing that VCSA appliance!
I remember making this video shortly before a long trip. I was actually working on the IBM Redbook team at the time, in a long term stay hotel in Tucson AZ, living there for 5 weeks. I couldn't finish editing the video before the trip, so I shipped my 27" 2560x1440 monitor to myself, at my own cost, knowing I needed far more than my puny laptop screen to get this done. I recall the feeling of publishing that final cut on Friday May 8 2015, knowing it might be helpful to folks who had trouble getting started with VMware. I had no clue how many at the time, all I knew was the frustration I was feeling with Camtasia video editing at the time. Getting all those annotations in and little cuts of dull, nothing-happening scenes out took many many hours. It really tried my patience. The final cut is still an hour and 18 minutes long. Fair to say that's loooong-form, eh?

June 1 2019 - TinkerTry's 8th birthday
I kind of forgot about this one until now, June 1st 2011 was when I started TinkerTry with this first post, with the rest of the 1,012 posts in the Archive. It looks like I came up with my still-current tagline by March of 2013:

TinkerTry IT @ home
Efficient virtualization, storage, backup, and more...

June 1 2019 - Wiredzone has sold (roughly) 1,000 TinkerTry'd Bundles to happy customers globally, while retaining less than a 0.5% return rate!

Honestly, this last one is the most meaningful stat of all to me. To think that over a thousand folks would slog through my crazy-long articles and put their trust in a heavily "TinkerTry'd" solution for their home lab needs, and be pretty darn happy about doing so. They're mostly IT Professionals honestly, so a rather niche audience. Well, not that niche, apparently!

I'm not one to rest on my laurels: TinkerTry will hopefully have an innovative Xeon D form factor I'll be blogging about soon, and it's not from Supermicro or GIGABYTE Server. Stay tuned!

I can't express enough how incredibly grateful I am for each and every one of my readers and viewers, for all the support you've shown me over the years. This popularity has attracted advertisers, and that certainly helps to keep the lights on, given I generally buy something outright, use it for a while, then blog about my success with that item. A pricey way of doing things, but I spend my pennies wisely, with an eye toward long term use and efficiency. It's really awesome to have turned this site into a sustainable operation, and I'm so glad I toughed it out those first very lean years.

Blogging has led to good things for me and my family, and I quite enjoy doing it. It has led to (and funded) projects that gave me something to talk about while publicly speaking, which actually led to my job at VMware. By the way, I have a new career advancement opportunity that's imminent, I'm excited and grateful for that too, more on that soon.

By the way, if you're thinking the ads in such a video makes a YouTuber wealthy, well, that's just not the case. The lifetime earnings for that video are in the low four figures, and it took over a hundred hours of rehearsing and preparations just to create it. That said, I'm very grateful that YouTube is essentially free hosting for content creators like me, with roughly half of the views coming directly from a YouTube search, not from elsewhere on the web or from the Tinkertry article. I could never afford the CDN fees that pushing 1 hour 18 minutes of 1080P HD content to the rest of the planet would cost.

Enough of the retrospectives, it's time to get back to my bloated drafts folder, and put the finishing touches on some new articles I always have in the hopper. It's still quite the thrill every time I publish something new, for you, my valued readers.

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